Logitech USB QuickCam Home

Review date: 10 December 1998.
Last modified
03-Dec-2011.

Every now and then a computer product comes
along that just screams "techno toy". You know, just looking at it, that
most of its buyers don't really need it, and will never do anything useful
with it. But what the hey, it's fun!

Connectix' various QuickCams, originally
black and white and now colour, definitely fall into this category. Sure,
people do pictures for Web sites with them, and some get used as security
cameras or find some other arguably serious application, but I feel confident
in saying that 99% of the content captured by QuickCams over the years has
been utterly irrelevant to anything but frivolity.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

New QuickCams today wear the Logitech name, because Connectix sold their
camera division to the mouse maker for a cool 25 million US dollars half
way through 1998. The hardware, however, remains the same.

I checked out the white-box OEM version USB QuickCam
Home, which sells for about $220 (Australian dollars). The USB interface
is perfect for devices like this - previous PC cameras either used parallel
port interfaces, which made them Macintosh-incompatible and slowed down
the computer they were connected to, or used their own special capture cards,
which made them more expensive and a pain to install, and also, usually,
Macintosh-incompatible. No longer.

The QuickCam Home ought to work with a USB-equipped Macintosh, if Logitech
ever write a driver for it. At present, you need to use the more expensive
QuickCam VC if you've got a Mac.

The QuickCam Home also has a microphone built in, so you don't have to
fiddle with a separate mike if you want to try videoconferencing or record
a video clip.

What you get

The QuickCam Home is a simple gadget. The lens is in the middle of the
palm-sized, vaguely box-camera shaped body. A focus thumbwheel protrudes
under the lens. There's a microphone dimple on the left, and a green LED
to tell you when the camera's on. A button on the top is used to wake the
camera up and take still shots, and there's a little sliding privacy shutter
that covers the lens - but doesn't shut off the microphone.

The camera comes bundled with a program called Camware that handles most
of its functions. You also get Microsoft's NetMeeting for video-conferencing,
and the Reality Fusion Video Variety Pack, a collection of four little games
which use rather clever video-analysis technology to let you "use your body
as the joystick", which in English means pop bubbles and bop balls around
by waving your limbs like a lunatic. The sheer level of brutality of the
"punch the clown" game shocked and horrified me. The level was far too low.

Setting up

Like all USB devices, the QuickCam Home is very easy to set up. Install
the driver software from the included CD; when you're told, plug the camera
in. That's about it. The camera comes with a bracket that sticks via a circular
mount with an adhesive pad to monitor, desktop or what have you, or can
serve as a camera stand. The bracket snaps onto the circular mount, so you
can snap it off again for desktop use. One extra mount is provided.

The QuickCam attaches to the bracket with a swivel mount which lets it
turn to any angle, so mounting the bracket on the side or bottom edge of
a monitor is fine. You can also slide the QuickCam out of the bracket and
hand-hold it, within the limits of the two metre cable.

Since USB extension cables are not even officially supposed to exist,
this two metres is a solid limit. You can buy extension
cables - a five metre (16.4 foot) one made by Belkin costs about $US20 -
but the vendors generally say "No warranty, no returns, no tech support".
Get the picture?

You could therefore use the QuickCam for mobile photography if you lugged
around a USB-equipped laptop as well, but otherwise its movement is severely
restricted. Incidentally, the maximum officially permissible length for
any USB cable is five metres.

Using it

Whenever you want to use the QuickCam, just press the button on the top.
Camware runs, and the camera kicks in. Press the button again, or click
the take-photo button in Camware, and you've taken a picture. Making video
clips is just as easy.

Your obedient scribe, as viewed in Camware.
If you're going to stick a little camera on top of your monitor and wish
to retain a shred of self-esteem, it helps to be really, really photogenic.
Or drunk.

Camware supports time-lapse and stop-motion animation, too; the total
length of a time-lapse clip can only be nine minutes and 59 seconds, but
the frames can be spread out over up to 23 days. Stop-motion is dead simple;
just press the button every time you want to snap a frame.

If you need some time to hold the cat up in front of the camera, no problem;
a "timer release" feature is available for both video and still frame snapping.

The QuickCam can capture video in the 352 by 288 and 176 by 144 pixel
CIF and QCIF formats, although it can't manage the
30 frames per second specified by CIF. The actual frames per second you
get out of it varies depending on the resolution you ask for and the light
level; 15 frames per second is reasonably smooth and perfectly attainable
in a well lit room in CIF resolution. Camware also lets you capture video
in 160 by 120 and 320 by 240 resolutions.

The QuickCam's official focus range is six inches to infinity, but it
can actually focus in much closer - see the close-up
shot of the ruler. If you're likely to need to take pictures of small
things, this feature more than outweighs the annoyment engendered by having
to twiddle the focus whenever you point the camera at something new.

The warm and fuzzy look of the Camware application hides some more advanced
features. You can manually set exposure and horizontally or vertically flip
the camera output, tweak brightness and contrast, compensate for more or
less backlighting and so on. All of this helps image quality considerably,
particularly in lower light, but there's still no way the QuickCam will
pass for a professional device.

The original, unretouched picture I cropped the above product
shot out of. Taken with my faithful Kodak DC120, it's 1280 by 960 pixels.
I've JPEG compressed it to get it down to a reasonable size, but this shows
you pretty much what the output of the DC120, still a quite good digital
camera, looks like.

Now, for comparison, here's the QuickCam Home's view of the DC120
- again, unretouched. Only 320 by 240 pixels (the QuickCam can output higher
resolutions, but it just uses interpolation),
and more than a little crunchy. This is with extra illumination from a desk
lamp.

This is what you get without the extra illumination. This room
is quite bright enough to read in, but you need lots of light for a cheap
camcorder CCD like the one in the QuickCam.

The QuickCam's manual focus lets it get in close - very close!
This metal ruler is marked in metric on the top, imperial on the bottom.

Again - lots of light, please! I could read the markings on this
ruler just fine with only the room light on, but the QuickCam certainly
couldn't.

The QuickCam's software has an Enhance feature, which does not
a lot to your images. Proper image editing software like Photoshop can pull
rather more useful detail out of QuickCam images. Here's the ruler close-up
after an Auto Levels and an Unsharp Mask manipulation in Photoshop. This
took all of about three seconds to do.

Sending stuff

Easily e-mailing your QuickCam output is one of Camware's strengths.

If you select an image or video and click the e-mail button, Camware
automatically compresses the file and opens a new e-mail message in your
mail program with the file already attached. Just fill in the address, change
the default this-file-created-with-a-QuickCam text if you want to, and send
it off. You need a MAPI compliant mail program to do
this, but pretty much all of them are.

You can configure the level of compression used for video clips. By default
Camware uses very high, fairly ugly compression in order to make files that
can sanely be sent over modem links.

If your intended recipient already has the Microsoft NetShow application
or something that can handle its files - like, for example, the Windows
Media Player that comes with Windows 98 - you can send them your videos
in Microsoft's currently little-known but highly compressed
ASF format. Or you can send the video in self-playing
executable format, at the cost of a bit more size.

Alternatively, the Save As option for video clips lets you save them
in any format your computer has a codec for. Various
codecs come with Windows, and you can download and install more. This lets
you save your videos as universally comprehensible AVI files, for instance.
Or, if you use an obscure codec, as universally incomprehensible
AVIs.

On the down side, you can't change the amount of compression used for
JPEG images by Camware. Camware uses an unreasonably low amount of compression,
considering the not-so-hot output quality of the camera, and commonly produces
70 kilobyte images, which is outrageous for 320 by 200.

It managed to encode a picture taken with the lens cover closed as a
27.5 kilobyte file, which is ridiculous. Re-saving the image as a medium
quality JPEG from Photoshop, whose usual sin is making JPEGs too
big, created only a 4.35 kilobyte file.

If you're genuinely interested in e-mailing your pictures, import them
into a paint program and save them from there. If you don't want the files
compressed at all, you can save them from Camware in BMP format.

The driver software also works as a TWAIN driver,
so you can directly import files into any image processing program you care
to name. The TWAIN incarnation of the software gives you very easy access
to all of the image-tweaking sliders. And Camware supports drag and drop,
so you can just drag an image from Camware's Preview Pad to more or less
any Windows program you like.

The QuickCam is also a standard Video For Windows device, which means
it works with WebCam software and, indeed, pretty much any other Windows
video software you care to name. Even if you've only got a modem link, simple
webcam software like
WebCam2000 will
let your friends watch you compute over the Internet - but you'll need to
tell them the IP address your Internet Service Provider has assigned you
for that dial-up session. You can find this out by selecting the Run option
from the Start menu and typing "winipcfg".

Limitations

Like all cheap CCD cameras (find out more about CCDs in my
Digital Camera Data article), the QuickCam Home
likes light. Lots of light. A daylit room is plenty bright enough for it,
but the level of illumination in an ordinary room at night is not enough.
You'll still get an image, but it'll be dim and heavily lined. If you want
to do night-time picture taking, therefore, you'll need at least an extra
desk lamp.

Saving files from Camware is cumbersome - you have to save them individually.
You can't snap a sequence of pictures and dump them all to disk as they're
taken, or select 12 images in the Preview Pad and choose to save them all
in one go.

Overall

Quite apart from being a lot of fun, you can, if you
put your mind to it, do some useful things with a QuickCam. The output resolution
is too low for print applications but it's fine for the Web, where 320 by
200 is a pretty big image. And $220 (Australian dollars) is a good price
for a USB computer camera with a microphone built in. The cheapest standalone
digital cameras cost twice as much and don't deliver much better image quality
than the QuickCam anyway. Standalone cameras are fully portable, which is
a big advantage, but if you don't often have cause to make happy snaps of
things outside your computer room, or you've got a recent laptop with a
USB port, this won't be a problem for you. And standalone cameras don't
do video.

If you've recently found yourself having trouble recapturing that sense
of wonder which, in years past, caused people to buy useless light pens
and cumbersome three-shot video digitisers, the QuickCam USB is a fine way
to find it again. Recommended.

Pros:

Cons:

Simple to set up and use

Built in microphone

Likes lots of light

Tethered by two metre cable

Glossary

ASF: Microsoft's Advanced Streaming
Format, a streaming (plays while it downloads) video format which Microsoft
plan to be the successor to the old AVI format.

CIF/QCIF: Common Intermediate
Format is a standard format for videoconferencing. It specifies 30 frame
per second video, with each frame 352 by 288 pixels. QCIF, or Quarter CIF,
transfers one fourth as much data and is thus slim enough to work over regular
modems.

Codec: Short for compressor/decompressor,
a codec is software or hardware for compressing and decompressing data.
In the narrow definition used here, codecs are just software, and they're
used for compressing and decompressing video and audio files.

Interpolation: Making small
images big without turning them all blocky. Software can give the impression
of much higher resolution than the hardware actually delivers.

The smiley face on the left is an 11 by 11 pixel image, blown up to 55
by 55. The image on the right is an interpolated 55 by 55 version, in which
the darkness of each pixel is determined by means of a clever algorithm
that works from the darkness of its neighbours.

OEM: Original Equipment Manufacturer.
In the computer industry, OEMs are not, in fact, the people who make the
chips and the boards - they're the people who package the parts up into
completed, customised computers. An "OEM version" of a product is one intended
for sale to these people, and generally comes in a plain white box, includes
minimal bundled software and other fripperies, and costs rather less than
the "full retail version".

OEM software and hardware sometimes comes with a contract that requires
it to be sold only as part of a complete computer system, or at least with
a motherboard and processor. Less scrupulous dealers have been known to
ignore such contracts and just sell the cheap gear on to the public.

TWAIN driver: TWAIN stands
for Technology (or Toolkit) Without An Interesting Name. No, really, it
does. Who says programmers have no sense of humour? Anyway, a TWAIN driver
is a piece of software that a paint or optical character recognition or
other graphic-related program can call upon to deliver an image. The image
may come from a scanner or a digital camera or anything else; the driver
talks to the hardware and provides the user with its own interface, then
delivers the final picture to the invoking program.